Pretension as a mass phenomenon

Against this backdrop you have a murder and a chase — not an ordinary one but more in the nature of a treasure hunt, filled with puzzles and word games. The book derives its name from the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, whose paintings are claimed to be spilling with clues and mischievous leads.

Ingenious? It is, for a while. It seems intelligent as well what with its progressive pro woman message; its scattered bits of history and theoretical arguments, and the rarified world — of curators, symbologists, cryptologists and researchers — that it inhabits; and the mildly clever wordplay and allusions of the clues.

But author Dan Brown’s writing style is trite, lacking subtlety and depth and despite a well paced plot, the device soon begins to pall. Critics have also expressed concern over the dubious nature of the assumptions and facts that spill from the book’s ‘‘expert’’ characters and over Brown’s methods of mixing names of real life historical figures and actual places with his ‘‘theories’’ to create a misleading patina of veracity.

Yet, the book has not just recorded huge sales but has acquired a certain sort of reputation of intellectualism. If Harry Potter bridged the gap between child and adult then Da Vinci seems to have crossed the barricade between the common man and the intelligentsia. It is not so much a dumbing down but a smartening up. Pretension is no longer a preserve of the elite; it has become a mass phenomenon, and a very lucrative one at that.

What are the implications of such a development? For one, it is likely to popularise art, doing, as one reviewer observed, for Da Vinci what Amadeus did for Mozart. Even more important, it raises the possibility of doubt. Recorded history is replete with examples of neglect and distortion. The Da Vinci Code arrives against a backdrop of a demand from women for greater inclusiveness in the church. And no book could seem to do more for this particular cause: The Da Vinci Code is littered with references to the ‘‘sacred feminine’’, ‘‘yin and yang’’; characters spout wisdom such as: ‘‘Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete’’; the Holy Grail is said to be the remains of Mary Magdelene.

And yet despite its overtly feminist bent, the book does not treat women really as equal to men. Sophie, the central (and only) major female character is cast as an innocent who must be informed and educated by men, first her grandfather and then the two men in whose company she is thrown. Powerful men in the book battle and kill to protect the ‘‘sacred feminine’’ but in the absence of live, active, female protagonists, women remain little more than a chalice, a vessel for men to use or worship.

Not so long ago, another religion-based fictional product, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ, was the subject of much public and media attention. Like the Da Vinci Code, Gibson’s film, on the last hours of Jesus, was ambitious in that it was a lavishly mounted production that sought to portray Jesus’s vulnerability and used an archaic language for the dialogue. Like the book, the film evoked criticism on grounds of distortion and inaccuracy. But Mahlon H. Smith of Rutgers University voiced a widespread feeling in his complaint that Gibson’s ‘‘unrelenting focus on mindless brutality’’ completely obscured Jesus’s message of love, forgiveness and compassion.

Pretension: a claim or aspiration to something. Origin: from medieval Latin praetensio, from praetens (alleged), from praetendere.